Embodiments of the invention relate generally to computer file systems, and more particularly to accessing files in another computer system based on content filtering.
Computers are commonly interconnected in a network for user communications, exchanging data, or retrieving data as in a client-server configuration. In a networked computing environment, a user may need to access data files stored on another computer that is connected to the user's computer by a network in an operation called file sharing. The files may be in a shared file system operating at the remote computer. There are various commonly used file systems such as Distributed File System (DFS) and Global Storage Architecture (GSA). In order to access the shared files, the user often initiates a process referred to as drive mapping which associates the remote file structure with an unused local drive designation at the user's local computer. The user and applications running on local computer can then perform file operations on the mapped remote files as if the files reside in a data storage drive at the local computer.
In Windows™ operating systems that commonly operate on personal computers, a user may initiate the drive mapping using system options such as “Map Network Drive”, a command “net use”, or the like. (Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.) In Unix® type operating systems, a drive mapping may be set up with the command “mount” or the like. (UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.) File operations on the mapped drive, however, can be slow, especially when network bandwidth is limited and the shared file system contains a large number of folders and files. For example, a file search (e.g. Google desktop search) must iterate all the files and essentially read all the data from the files in the mapped drive that are sent to the client machine through the network. The file search operation is then performed on the returned files in the local disk to find the files that match the search expression.